Woody Allen
Interiors

"Interiors" is Woody Allen's first dramatic film, the first film in which the director demonstrates his ability to master a different language, one that goes beyond his unmistakable humor and physicality. Allen steps out of the scene in every sense, to focus behind the camera on what is undoubtedly his most affectionate homage to Ingmar Bergman, his cinematic idol, frequently cited in his comedies. It's a visual and dramaturgical homage, recognized in the urgency to narrate universal and strongly bourgeois, familial pains. The plot centers on a high bourgeois family, with artistic and literary inclinations: an elderly couple with three now-grown daughters.

Their whole world collapses when the father decides to leave, to abandon his wife, a strong woman capable of keeping everything and everyone under control. Her nerves instantly give way upon the news, sending her down an irreversible path of neurosis. At this point, all the fragilities of the three daughters emerge, each destined to enter a personal journey into an emotional abyss. From here, it's an unfolding of internal wounds, leading to the dramatic conclusion. Strong are the symbolisms, Bergmanian as well: the family home overlooking an ever-turbulent, wintry sea that seems ready to swallow everything at any moment, the consistently low and twilight lighting that often accompanies the characters both indoors and outdoors.

But the film, in addition to being technically admirable, is exemplary in highlighting those pains that each of us may savor in life, and that are so damn bourgeois: the inability to appease our feelings, in pursuit of artificial life standards that blind us to the reality of things. And how this often leads us to live through genuine emotional degenerations.